by Hilary McKay
All of a sudden she was tired of living in a patchwork mixture of Vanessa’s donations, Miss Vane’s contrivances, and her grandmother’s often-stated belief that it didn’t matter what you wore, so long as you behaved.
Grandmother is wrong, it matters a lot! thought Clarry.
It seemed, astonishingly, that it even mattered to Peter. A postcard from him was waiting when she got home. He had sent instructions:
Don’t call out my name when you see me, he had written. Don’t look too pleased if I win anything. Or too interested. Don’t go talking to everyone like you do. Don’t fuss and don’t wear anything that people will notice.
Clarry looked regretfully at the brass-topped table, remembering the time that she had disposed of the family piano without a single pang of conscience. As she gazed, she suddenly understood what Mr. King, that industrious rag-and-bone-man, meant by the hard way to get money.
I need a job! thought Clarry.
“I would love to come to Oxford with you,” Clarry told Miss Fairfax on Monday morning, “but first I’ll have to find a way to earn some money.”
Then Miss Fairfax replied, exactly as if she had been waiting for this moment. “The Grace twins in class one missed most of last term through measles and whooping cough. Their mother needs someone to help them catch up. Their father is away, and their mother hasn’t time, she works for the post office now, and is never home before six. Two hours every day after school except Wednesdays, and Saturday mornings, nine till one. Twelve hours. There’s a six-year-old too, who the twins will collect on their way home from school. The family happen to be my neighbors and their mother asked my advice. I thought of you at once. She is offering six shillings a week, which seems fair, although not generous. What do you think? Will you have to ask your father?”
“No,” said Clarry. “I won’t have to do that. Thank you, Miss Fairfax. When can I begin?”
Twenty-Seven
“HE WAS CALLED OSLER,” PETER said to Simon. “Professor Osler. He walked right in front of me as I was riding down the street. He admitted it was his fault. I didn’t hurt him; he thought he’d hurt me. I had to push my bike afterward, and he saw the way I walked. Then we got talking, and I found out he was a professor of medicine.”
“A doctor? So is that what you’ll be?”
“At least I’d be useful.”
“And they’ll let you?”
“He said so, and I’ve already passed the entrance exams.”
“It’s not what I thought you’d do.”
“It’s not what I thought I’d do,” said Peter, “but now there’s a war and I can’t stand doing nothing.”
“Neither can I,” said Simon.
They were standing at the library window looking out over the sports fields, the same fields that they’d stared at the day they met. The view was unchanged—the same mud, the same rain—but they were changed. Peter no longer looked like he was waiting to step off a train for a second time. Simon, although taller and bonier than ever, no longer looked as if he was about to fall apart at the joints.
“It’s not been that bad,” said Peter. “I thought I’d die here, when I first came. Clarry kept me alive with her letters and her butterflies.”
“I remember,” said Simon. “She used to paint you a new one every time things got bad. Have you still got them?”
“Of course. Five. All the rarest. She never sent a swallowtail because things never got that terrible. Do you remember how we cleared the common-room chimney that time?”
“Yes, and Clarry’s Christmas party. And Rupert climbing the chapel roof. And us singing ‘Three Little Maids from School’ at the concert. Practicing in secret. Rupert making us learn the actions with the fans. My dad laughing till he couldn’t breathe, and everyone saying afterward, ‘I thought you were supposed to be shy!’ ”
Rain splattered against the window then, suddenly hard.
“It’s not much like summer,” said Simon, gloomy. “Look at those idiots out there with that ball! God, I hate outside! Do you ever hear from him?”
“Who? Professor Osler?”
“No! Rupert, of course!”
“Oh. No. Never.”
“I wonder what he’s doing right now. Right this minute. Right this second. Over there!”
He spoke so passionately that Peter looked at him in surprise.
“You must think about him!”
Peter shook his head.
“I do. Well. I suppose you think I’m a fool.”
“I don’t.”
“What, then?” asked Simon, slumping into a chair and dropping his head onto a table.
Peter, with great effort, dragged himself into Simon the Bony One’s elusive, aching world and said, “I’m really glad you didn’t climb out of that window. I’m really glad you stayed.” Then, although he didn’t do human contact much, especially in school, he made a great effort and rubbed his friend between his hunched bony shoulders for forty-five seconds, which he timed by the library clock. He broke off to laugh.
“Do you remember when he left us three bottles of beer and his spare key to the cricket pavilion?”
“What happened to that key?”
“I’ve got it somewhere. I suppose it’ll be our turn to pass it soon. We’re nearly done here. Have you noticed any miserable mud-hating first years who deserve it?”
“They all look the same to me. Bellowing and wrestling. I don’t care about them. Let them find their own escapes.”
“All right,” said Peter. “Let them. Clarry will be at speech day, did I tell you? She’s coming with your family.”
“I don’t know why my family want to bother,” grumbled Simon. “I won’t be collecting any prizes. Never have, never will. Anyway, they’re only books! What kind of prize is a book?”
“Would you like a prize that wasn’t a book?”
“Yes,” said Simon, after some thought. “I’d like a prize for sticking it out! I’m not going to university. I haven’t written any good essays. I’ll probably never read a book again. I’ll definitely never kick a football. But I have stuck it out!”
“Yes you have,” agreed Peter, and later that night Simon found an envelope shoved under his pillow. It was labeled:
THE PENROSE BONNERS AWARD FOR STICKING IT OUT, WITH SPECIAL COMMENDATION FOR THAT TIME YOU DIDN’T CLIMB OUT OF THE WINDOW
Inside, on a leather bootlace, was Rupert’s spare key to the cricket pavilion.
Twenty-Eight
THE LINE OF BATTLE WAS called the western front. It stretched 440 miles, from the North Sea to the Swiss border. It began in the corner of Belgium, bulged into Ypres, crossed the Flanders fields where later the poppies grew, ran south through the Somme (that nightmare place), swept eastward in a great curve across the French countryside and then up into the mountains. It was made of trenches, dugouts, barbed wire, jam tins, boredom, broken woodland, rubble of homes, duckboards, lost socks, latrines, hastily dug graves, love letters, liquefied bodies, sandbags, poetry, nameless machinery, songs rewritten, tank tracks, and a thousand other things, the chief amongst them being mud. No wonder that it hardly moved, through all the years of war.
It was populated by (amongst others) Britons, Germans, French, Canadians, West Indians, Prussians, Australians, Irish, Dutch, two cavalry divisions from India, horses, rats, dogs, lice, pigeons, and fleas. Birds flew over it. Cats had more sense than to go near it, except a few of the most curious and brave. They were very much loved by whatever nationality they found themselves amongst. The line was lit by flares, stars, the usual sun and moon, rockets, shells, bullet flashes, firebombs, and carefully shielded lucifer matches. It smelled of earth, rum, death, smoke, urine, tinned beef, and hot metal. Guns thumped like intermittent heartbeats, and the barbed wire rattled and jangled in the wind. There were other sounds that made their hearers stop their ears till they were over, but the echoes stayed in their memories for as long as they lived.
The line was the shape of a long, lopsided sm
ile. A ravenous, expectant smile. A greedy, unreasonable smile, considering how very, very well it was fed.
On either side of the line were the armies. Neither was winning, although not because they didn’t try. They tried very hard and when one way didn’t work they tried another. The Germans were the first to use poison gas, and the British were the first to use tanks. Perfectly reasonable people, the sort who in their previous lives let wasps out of windows, read storybooks to children doing all the proper voices, flinched at flat notes, and hardly ever shouted, got drunk, or forgot their mums’ birthdays—absolutely ordinary people made considerable efforts to kill other absolutely ordinary people whom they had never even met.
Things didn’t get better; they got worse.
It was all quite normal to Rupert now. It was 1917, he’d been there from the start, he was one of the unshakables. He’d moved about a lot but now he was back almost where he’d begun, in Flanders, on the left-hand curl of the smile. There was a feeling in the air of a job well done, because the British had just managed to blow up nineteen huge mines, right under the German front lines. They had other plans in mind too, equally uncivilized. First, however, they had to prepare the ground. That meant Rupert had spent the hours of darkness (never long enough at the end of May) crawling around in front of the trenches, cutting barbed wire. Barbed wire was wicked stuff. It caught men like fish in a net. Both sides used it in great tangled coils, held up by fence posts, all along the trenches. In some places it was so thick you could hardly see through it. They didn’t try and cut those dark masses; they went where it was thinner and looser. It was a horrible job. It rattled as you pulled it away. They’d tried cutting it with machine-gun fire, but it didn’t really work. The coils would lift and bounce down again, more or less intact.
Rupert had survived the night, got back to the trench just before dawn broke, eaten a sustaining but indigestible breakfast of tinned beef, rust-colored tea, and a slice of somebody’s birthday cake from home, found a dugout with an empty bunk, and crawled inside. When Simon had looked out of the rainy window and wondered where Rupert was, that was the place.
Fast asleep with his boots on.
Away from the front, where the supply lines ran, there were rest camps and first aid stations, and even patches of farmland. Often at that time of year you could hear skylarks over the fields. Soldiers remarked how strange it was that the birds should be there, but in fact the birds had been there for centuries.
The really strange thing was that the soldiers were there.
Another thing that people thought odd was that the skylarks sang in the language of their homes. In English for the English, in French for the French, and in Dutch for the Dutch.
More puzzling still, on the other side of the trenches, a few miles away, the skylarks were singing in German.
It was a war where absolutely nothing made sense.
Twenty-Nine
IT WAS THE WEEKEND, AND Clarry had a list of jobs she ought to do. They included, amongst other things, her weekly letters to Rupert and Peter, and somehow organizing proper food for the next day. Clarry’s father, despite his weekday absences, expected Sunday lunch to appear in a well-dusted dining room at one o’clock promptly, no matter what was happening in the rest of the world.
Clarry could hardly spare the time for cooking and housework anymore. The twelve hours a week she spent being a mother’s help could not have been happier, but they made an awful hole in her days.
Worth it, though, thought Clarry. It was not just the six shillings, welcome as they were, it was the warm house waiting at the end of the day, the half-grown kitten sleeping in the armchair, the teapot standing beside the cups, the pot of jam and the plate piled with brown bread and butter, ready to be shared before they got down to work.
At first, Clarry had hesitated at joining in with tea.
“There are four cups, Miss Penrose,” a kind twin had pointed out, “and four plates.”
Miss Penrose. That was how Miss Fairfax had introduced her to the children. “Here is Miss Penrose, and you are extraordinarily lucky to have her!” she had said, and given Clarry a firm Get on with it nod as she left them at the gate.
Clarry had fought back the desire to say “Call me Clarry!” and got on with it.
It helped being Miss Penrose, much to her surprise. Miss Penrose could do things that Clarry would have found difficult. Miss Penrose could say, “Tell me what you can remember from yesterday,” or, “Robbie, I think you need to wash your buttery hands.” It made her feel grown-up and confident. And already she was really helping. Often now a twin cried out, “Oh yes, I understand!”
Clarry loved it when someone understood.
Six-year-old Robbie had joined in from the first day. “Teach me too!” he had begged, climbing up to the table. At first he simply toiled over copying pictures Clarry drew for him. Then she drew him a kitten reading a book, and suddenly he was reading too. He loved words that rhymed.
Kitten.
Mitten, he copied, breathing heavily over the paper.
Ritten, he added triumphantly, all by himself. “Look, Miss Penrose, I’ve written ‘ritten’!”
“You really have!” exclaimed Clarry, equally proud.
“Last week he could only write ‘Rob,’ ” observed a twin. “R-o-b. That was all.”
“Last week I cried in math,” said the other twin. “From fractions! Imagine crying at fractions now!”
Years before, Peter had taught Clarry fractions with apple slices at the kitchen table. Now she was teaching kitchen table fractions herself, this time with bread and butter, but just as successfully. For a whole week no slice of bread was eaten before it had been divided into halves, thirds, quarters, sixths, and twelfths Now the twins could juggle fraction sums with ease.
“Two thirds minus one quarter,” they said, studying their plates with care. “That’s eight twelfths minus three twelfths. Five twelfths! Easy! You almost don’t need the bread and butter!”
“I hear you’re coping very well,” said Miss Fairfax, at school. “Are you enjoying it?”
“I love it,” said Clarry, and it was true, but still it made an awful lot of late-night homework.
On Saturdays, it was always Rupert’s letter that came first.
Dear Rupert,
The moon last night was like a picture in a book, a silver crescent with a big star nearby that was the planet Venus. I made a wish.
I have got a job now, Rupe. I am a mother’s help! I earned six shillings last week! It was very hard not to rush to the shops and spend it all—I did buy a bottle of silver ink in the stationer’s. Unfold this little piece of black paper and you will see the moon and Venus shining over the chimney pots. I drew them for you. The silver cat is a real cat that belongs to the people I work for. His name is Mr. Paws.
Grandmother writes that Grandfather is not well. She says his chest is very wheezy, and he won’t go out of the house anymore. She is quite well herself, though, and she says nothing changes in Cornwall. I am glad about that. I like to think that every day our train huffs into the station, and stops in a cloud of steam. And people come hurrying over the footbridge to meet it, and you can see the sea as soon as you jump out, blue and green, behind the red rooftops.
I have to go. Miss Vane has arrived with a cookery book. She says it will help me take care of my poor father.
With love and a hug from Clarry
As well as the cookery book, Miss Vane had brought a flabby parcel of liver, wrapped up in brown paper.
“Liver needs an onion with it,” she told Clarry. “Have you an onion?”
“No,” said Clarry thankfully.
“I thought not, so I brought you one.”
Clarry looked fearfully at the brown paper bundle and asked if Miss Vane had rather not keep it for her cats.
“Clarry dear, there’s a war on,” said Miss Vane, rather sternly. “My cats are managing on beast heart. I was very lucky to find this liver, and I thought of you stra
ightaway. The only difficulty is that it needs cooking at once, and I have to be out at a Red Cross meeting so I won’t be able to help.”
“Couldn’t it be cooked tomorrow?” pleaded Clarry.
“I’m afraid by then it will be off, ” said Miss Vane solemnly. “Which is why it was so cheap. I have bookmarked a simple recipe and I’m sure you will manage. Liver doesn’t take long. You can have it tomorrow with a baked potato and that will be a very nice lunch.”
“But you said it would be off!”
“Not cooked,” said Miss Vane patiently, always remembering that Clarry hadn’t a mother to teach her such things. “Cooking will save it. I must hurry. We’re packing parcels for the Italian front where they are having a dreadful time.”
“I’m a coward,” said Clarry remorsefully. “I’ll cook it. Will you come to lunch if it works?”
“I should be delighted,” said Miss Vane heroically, “and I will bring a rhubarb pudding. There’s a rhubarb glut, and I bought a great bundle.”
“Lovely,” said Clarry. She detested rhubarb, and the thought of the liver appalled her, but she was determined to be brave and so she opened the cookery book, unwrapped the brown paper, blinked only for a moment, and then began steadily following instructions. It was a peacetime recipe, so she had to improvise a little, with snipped-up (churchyard) grass for thyme, and cough syrup for sherry. She nearly forgot the onion on which Miss Vane had encouraged her to believe the success of the whole enterprise depended. Still, when it was done, she had gained so much courage that she was able to think of her most difficult task of all.
Clothes.
Somehow, she had to buy clothes.
Clothes that would do for speech day (the poshest of the posh but nothing anyone would notice) and Oxford (“Do make an effort, Clarry!”). She had twelve shillings from Mrs. Grace, and the train fare she wouldn’t need from her father, less one shilling and sixpence for silver ink.